On growing number of unemployed graduates

It is just about time we started considering the essence of our universities vis-à-vis the number of unemployed graduates in the labour market. Our higher institutions keep churning out thousands of graduates yearly with no commensurate increase in employment opportunities, a situation which has swollen the rank of frustrated youths.

The graduates of polytechnics and colleges of education are roaming the streets everyday for greener pasture. But the pasture didn’t turn green.

Two things may have resulted to this. It is either our universities are no longer in tune with the philosophy of tertiary education or that students did not want to learn again. Students who are not acquiring basic knowledge for survival in their disciplines are making other serious graduates to be useless to themselves and to the society.

So many factors have been linked to this abysmal state ranging from defective academic curriculum, underfunding of our universities, and poor reading culture on the part of the students to the incessant strikes by staff unions in the universities.

A good number of students in our higher institutions are after the certificates they may not be able to defend after completing their studies instead of what they stand to gain from the school thus making them irrelevant in their chosen field. The SIWES programmes in our universities are not meeting the purpose for which it was instituted.

Students are not monitored and they are made to do all sorts of jobs outside their field which is defeating the purpose of its establishment. As a result of this, we keep producing graduates who are finding it difficult to fit in and compete in the field.

Funding is another problem. Our universities are grossly underfunded and thus do not have the facilities expected of an ivory tower. Even the payment of tuition in our state-owned institutions has not helped because the standard keeps falling and yet we feel the solution is to establish additional universities to the list of higher institutions.

There needs to be an urgent repositioning of tertiary education in Nigeria especially the universities. Nigerian universities’ curricula need to be reviewed to reflect challenges faced in the field.

The presence of many unemployed graduates on the streets portends a great danger for a country that hopes to become one of the top twenty economies by the year 2020. This is because education is key to achieve the set goals. Students should strive for the best of in whatever condition they find themselves in the university. All hands must be on deck to reposition our Ivory towers to meet the need for which they were created.